Something happened last week that has to have some folks awfully worried
at the moment. Two of the game's best programs, both on track for planned
rides deep into the heart of Omaha, toodled off to their conference openers
against decent but supposedly lesser competition and got their heads handed
to them: Baylor 3/9/4, Texas 2/1/3 and San Jose State 10/5/4, Rice 8/1/1.
The Texas offensive drought was especially shocking; six runs is a good
but not great inning in Austin, not a weekend.

Now, there are two ways to respond to this (OK, there are more than two,
but sacrificing a spotted gecko as propitiation to the bunt gods probably
isn't all that useful, so we'll just go with two): Shrug it off and assume
that it's just a bad weekend that you try to forget, or decide that
championship teams just don't do that sort of thing and start looking
forward to football season (this is obviously more of an option for
Longhorn fans than Owl fans). Having no access to the future, we'll have
to look to the past for guidance on which to choose. I've checked before,
and the team with the shortest longest losing streak (if that makes sense)
almost never wins the championship. Sweeps, though, are an interesting
animal, so let's see how often they happen to the best. Here's the worst
stretch for each of the champion teams back to 1997:

LSU, 1997. They never got swept, but they lost two conference series
at Mississippi State and Alabama. The Alabama loss followed a loss at
Arkansas, and those three were the longest losing streak of the year.

USC West, 1998. They had a really rough patch in early April, losing
two of three to Stanford at home, getting swept at Arizona State, and
losing to Loyola Marymount midweek. OK, so it can happen.

Miami South, 1999. They never got swept for three days, but they lost
a two-game series at Florida in early February followed by a loss at
FIU. That was the only three-game losing streak.

Miami South, 2001. They went all season without losing back-to-back
games, except for that little weekend at home when Fullerton disemboweled
them three straight.

Texas, 2002. They lost two series to Baylor and Nebraska but won the
Saturday game in both, so they managed to go the whole season without
ever losing two games in a row -- a rare feat indeed.

Rice, 2003. They had a couple of two-game losing streaks but never
lost a series in the comfortable confines of the WAC.

Cal State Fullerton, 2004. They opened the series with a sweep loss at
Stanford. It got better a bit, but they also lost series against Arizona
and Long Beach and a couple of games against Texas.

The short version, then, is that the nooses can be put away so we can get
on with the season. There's good news on the other front, though; two of
the four teams that pulled off the sweep made it to Omaha, so life in Waco
especially has to look pretty good right now, and there's some hope in San
Jose.

Tournament Watch

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament.
I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since
the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one
team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the
automatic bid.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.